Kitchen Disaster

I suppose it wasn’t quite  a disaster, but the bulk lunch I made for this week is definitely not the best thing I have ever eaten. Every Sunday I do my best to make something that I can easily package up in Tupperware and bring to work to last me at least through Wednesday. Curries, chili, soup or big salads usually do the trick, keeping me full, within budget, and healthy.

This Sunday I decided on a tofu curry with parsnips and carrots because I had a load of parsnips and carrots to use up before I leave for San Francisco.

I broke out the slow cooker and started layering flavors to create my curry sauce. I started with a can of Goya coconut milk, Thai Kitchen green curry paste (store was out of red), Burmese curry spice mix, and habanero oil. I wanted a rich, spicy sauce.

I chopped the carrots and parsnips and tossed those, along with baby potatoes into the slow cooker to start cooking. In the meantime, I cut extra firm Nasoya tofu into small strips.

I left the carrot/parsnip/potato mixture cooking on high for about an hour and a half, and when I went back to check, nothing had gotten the least bit tender. But the sauce was drying up and browning around the edges. I turned it down to low and left it for another 30 minutes, and went back to find more edge-burning. I thought the beauty of slow cookers was that you could just leave them to cook and not really do anything? After a little longer I added the tofu in, and because the root veggies had so long to go, the tofu ended up mush. The sauce got extremely thick and almost gluey. The taste was worse. I don’t like green curry nearly as much as I like red curry, and for some reason it tastes like raw tofu?

I let it cool, packed it up, and brought it for lunch on Monday. It looks absolutely hideous and really doesn’t taste that great, but since we are traveling and going to be spending a bit of money this week, I really need to eat it. I actually skipped it today in favor of eating peanuts and apples. I have a colleague from Virginia and she always brings the best peanuts when she visits! So, the moral of the story I guess is that while I truly do love about 98% of my kitchen creations, there may be times where tossing ingredients together might not work. I am also a little jaded with the slow cooking process. What if I hadn’t been there to stir every 20 minutes? Oh well.

I am off to do some packing for the weekend ahead and to hopefully do some blog post scheduling. I have a few great posts coming up while I am away, in addition to some coverage of the Foodbuzz Festival and my wine country adventures. I am also really hoping to find the time to write a post on food in literature and food memoirs. It has been brewing in my head for awhile, and maybe sitting on a plane for 6 hours will be a good time to let it out.

Have you had any kitchen disasters? Were you able to recover them or did you just toss it? Any lessons learned?

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